


Idumea

by grizzly_bear_bane



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-30 09:57:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3932500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grizzly_bear_bane/pseuds/grizzly_bear_bane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For as elegant and refined as Arthur’s made himself over the years, he was born on a plot of unruly grass, no bigger than the smallest room in Eames’ house. Not even in a town really, it's all just a vast open county spanning ranches and fields and rolling mountains—a county with a name Eames won’t pronounce, just for the chance to hear it pass through Arthur’s lips again in that drawl.</p><p>It's here where Eames learns that Arthur does not in fact fear death the way mere mortals do, and with good reason.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Idumea

**Author's Note:**

> Just a random thing to help me get through my irrational fear of tornados now that it's that time of year again.
> 
> *title from the Sacred Harp Singers' hymn of the same name.
> 
> Comments, critiques, and suggestions are always greatly appreciated. 
> 
> Enjoy.

 

 _Mamas don't let your babies_  
_grow up to be cowboys._  
_'Cos they'll never stay home_  
_and they're always alone._  
_Even with someone they love._

― Willie Nelson

++

+

 

“Where the hell are we?” Tulsa’s airport is nice enough, but already Eames is earning stares from round-bellied men in cowboy hats and denim shorts.

Arthur takes the heavy bag from Eames’ arm with care, revealing much more to the eyes around them than Eames can appreciate. He’s fixing Eames’ wrinkled lapel, prompting a wave of shaking heads and frowns from the onlookers. He stops at Eames’ tone and cuts his eye at him from under his lashes. “Changed your mind already?”

“’Course not. It’s just… different here, that’s all.”

Now Arthur’s frowning at him too.

Soon as their rented car makes its way south, his accent begins to reveal itself to Eames like some beautiful and private part of Arthur that Eames is certain has been shared with no one else in the whole world.

“Pushmataha,” Arthur sighs, as he turns the wheel down a winding road. “Antlers, proper.” It's as thick as honey, his words slowing and easing along like the cars and trucks they pass, unhurried and relaxed like his demeanor. They aren’t racing from danger or a countdown in a getaway car. There is no rush in these parts. Those hands guide the wheel with barely a grip, as they wait for a caravan of trackers to cross the intersection. The normal tension in his arms and shoulders releases more and more with every new stretch of pasture fences.

Arthur waits for the Johnny Cash song to finish playing on the radio before he turns it down even lower. "Feels like a Sunday, doesn't it?"

Eames chuckles. "It's so unimaginably  _quiet_. Where is everyone? There are more horses and cows than people."

"Folks are probably all in church still. Could be a fair in town, too." He shrugs, smiling at the radio when another of his favorites plays.

Eames rolls down the windows and watches Arthur's neat hair blow this way and that and the smile it brings to Arthur's lips. Arthur runs his fingers through it only once and lets Eames pet it more. This is perhaps the most fascinating thing Eames has seen in Oklahoma yet.

“Where, oh where,” he mutters, “has my rigid little ball of stress gone? You sure you're not interested in forging? You'd make a killing with it.” His fingers dip down the back of Arthur’s collar, massaging his neck as the sky above the fields clouds and grays.

Arthur hums out a quiet laugh and allows himself to enjoy Eames' tenderness. If not for him rolling his eyes at Eames' remark, Eames would have been convinced that this Arthur wasn’t real.

However, when Arthur parks, what looks to Eames like a bleak and hopeless row of tiny, worn down houses is real. The hard dirt road under the tires is real. The wild flowers, the weeds, and the distances his eyes can see all around them without so much as a two-story building to block his view is real.

Eames is speechless when he steps out and is told to watch for snakes in the knee-high grass. For as elegant and refined as Arthur’s made himself over the years, he was born on a plot of unruly grass, no bigger than the smallest room in Eames’ house. Not even in a town really, it's all just a vast open county spanning ranches and fields and rolling mountains—a county with a name Eames won’t pronounce, just for the chance to hear it pass through Arthur’s lips again in that drawl.

Arthur doesn’t even stay in his shoes long enough to get to the porch. All that insanely expensive leather and style is abandoned in the car. Eames watches, fascinated as Arthur rolls up his pantlegs to keep the dirt off of them before he hefts both his and Eames’ luggage from the trunk into the house past a whining, groaning screen door. 

Eames has to take a moment to let everything sink in. He leans against the car just looking at the house. Arthur’s right. From the outside, with its tin roof and its little porch and three steps, it looks like only two people can fit in it at one time, but Eames knows that Arthur’s parents had raised him and five other siblings in it. And the age on the white siding and windows is only from dust storms, not age.

It's always been Eames' belief that a person never really truly can understand someone until they’ve seen where they come from. He’d told Arthur this in London, and had been surprised that Arthur had agreed.

Up until that moment, he’d assumed that Georgia held those answers, where Arthur’s mix of city smarts and quietly hidden southern charm must have grown.

“Take me to Atlanta,” he’d had said in the evening, in his own massive house once he and Arthur had grown bored with his libraries and wine collections. “I want to feel that outlandish humidity and breathe that air.”

Lying on him on the couch, Arthur had tasted his wine like there were secrets in that glass that he had to extract. He’d shaken his head, surprising Eames as he’d whispered, “I’m not a true native there. I just stay in the city sometimes when I have to.”

“Well, where the hell do you come from, then?”

It had been clear from the continued tasting and swirling that his Arthur was dodging, until he’d looked past his glass to study Eames’ earnest face. “You sure? You hate being outside.”

“I see what you meant now, about staying outdoors.” This little squat of a house was only built to feed and shelter. On and in the grass, even in the road where a few small children play down at the furthest house or where a couple strummed guitars together in the shade, this open space had been their living room and their entertainment. Five siblings and two parents with their feet hardly out of school themselves, outside was where they got to stretch their legs and breathe. 

They spend all afternoon hacking away at the grass and sweep small dunes of pollen and dust from the porch, wash the windows, fix a loose shutter and oil the screen door. It's hard work Eames isn't used to. He's driven only by how seamlessly Arthur dives into it, climbing the roof to pluck out the weeds in the gutters with sweat rolling down his bare back.

Arthur. The same man who will never let anyone see him in a t-shirt and jeans on a job, and who chuckles at Cobb’s dull jokes professionally. The same man who only agreed to stay with Eames and his parents in London that one time because of fashion week, this is the same man who went through all of his grade school years being called Junior because his father named him after Jefferson Davis and the man who'd killed Abraham Lincoln. He is the same man who, from what Eames now understands, never had a childhood. Arthur has always lived with the worries and the responsibilities of a man twice his age and twice his size. Attached to Cobb and his family to a fault, this is the same man who graduated high school with his ailing grandmother the only one alive to see him earn that diploma before she too was taken by a storm not a year after.

“I’ve had to rebuild this place seven times now,” Arthur tells him, standing on the porch in the evening, freshly showered and fed and relaxing in one of Eames' t-shirts and short shorts that stunned Eames. His eyes playfully hop from the new hickey on Eames’ neck to the wooden railing where he taps the cigarette they’re sharing in an ashtray.

“What about the inside?”

“Oh, it was trashed, but furniture’s always easy to replace.”

Eames cannot fathom such a life at all. He can barely get the words out. “You come back here ever time you finish a job?” He shakes his head in awe. “I would suffocate here.” He watches Arthur’s slender hand slide over the wood, reaching for him.

Arthur’s smile is guarded, but so open and blunt in this place. “Just the summers to check on it if I’m lucky. Couple weekends here and there. I almost abandoned it once. Came back and all that was left was the foundation. Without a picture of it, I’d have never been able to get it built up again just right,” he muses.

Eames lets the wind blow under his shirt. He unhooks the buttons, trying not to stare at Arthur and how sensual his lean legs look as they tan. “Weird how we never really pay attention to something until it’s gone and we need it to be where it was.”

“Yeah.” Arthur huffs. “That’s true. Now though, I remember every floorboard, all the types of flowers mom grew, even the brand of faucet in the sinks.” He gazes at his work with a pride and pain that scares Eames more than the flashing lightning miles and miles away off in the distant plains southward. Eames doesn’t know random phrases in Cherokee the way Arthur does, and he has no idea how many people even live in Oklahoma, let alone Pushmataha County, but this Brit has heard enough of the kind of storms that whip up in a place like this.

The wind whistles and toys with the baggy t-shirt Arthur’s wearing. He leaves Eames on the porch to walk in the grass and over dirt patches in the yard, his bare toes musing the soil without thought, his hands shoved into the pockets of cutoffs that Eames already has and will very soon again rip off of him once they’re back inside.

“Arthur?”

Arthur’s eyes close as he takes a deep breath. He nearly startles, as if roused from a troubled sleep when Eames joins him, touching his hand.

Eames locks their fingers, again at a loss when the first rumble of thunder voices itself.

Arthur smiles, his eyes still closed. He squeezes Eames’ hand. “Think they’d be proud of me? I’ve done good keeping this place up. And the penthouse in Atlanta’s pretty big. Mom would be proud of that, at least.”

“But ever so disappointed with your wild and ungodly… ‘ _acquaintances_.’” He squeezes Arthur’s hand in return, his grin lewd.

“Hm.” Arthur plucks another smoke from the pack Eames keeps rolled up in his sleeve, lighting it with his own little matchbook. “Well, if that monster over there has its way, I might just be able to ask my folks myself.”

Eames can only laugh nervously. Goosebumps are already rising up his arms. “Darling, we ought to go inside, shouldn’t we? They sky is green and there are alien clouds looming over us.”

When Arthur at last opens his eyes, his gaze is skyward, serene even, if not for the touch of something hard in his stare.

Eames swallows to settle his pounding heart without success. The wind only taunts it to be beat faster in his chest. “How do we know we’re safe?”

“When it’s over.”

“Well, that’s comforting. Shouldn’t we be heading under the house, just for good measure?”

Arthur shakes his head. “We never had a cellar. Too much money for that. We’ll be fine. Come and sit on the porch with me.”

No sooner than they reach the porch the sky opens up with heavy rain and hail the size of two-pound coins. The ice hits the ground and rattles with a sound like fireworks before the thunder makes the house tremble. Beyond the fields, the emerald sky sparkles with flash after flash of lightning.

Arthur stands at the railing with his hands on his hips, letting the wind spray him with bursts of raindrops. “Storms out here are like venomous snakes,” he muses, almost to himself. “ _Beautiful_ , vibrant colors and freaky clouds that just look…otherworldly…like you’d said. Leaves you in awe, sometimes, spellbound… until it traps you, and then it opens its mouth and if you’re not devoured by it, you sure wish you had been. _Anything_ is better than being the only one who lives through a direct hit.”

“They didn’t know any better, Arthur, but you do.” He’s unnerved by Arthur’s chuckle.

“And yet, I still can’t stop it from happening to someone else. The horror of the human condition.”

Arthur’s back in the yard before Eames knows any better. He returns soaked to the bone with a clump of hail in his palm to show Eames. "Getting hit with one of these is almost worst than being shot," he teases.

The hail is cold like death when Eames touches one. 

He's on the edge of his seat now. Far off on the horizon, an ominous dip in a cloud swirls. He rises to stand with Arthur, suddenly terrified. Every nerve in his body screams to that cloud to still, but Arthur’s right. They’re humans, all of them, all of the people who could be underneath that lightning and hail and that threatening dip. If there isn’t anything else on earth that he could ever wish for, it’s that that dip shows them mercy.

It doesn’t. Far off in the distance, sirens ring the moment the tornado forms.

Eames’ grip on Arthur’s wrist is bruising. “Where is it going?”

“Which one?”

“What?” He follows Arthur’s point and wishes he hadn’t. A closer, wider nightmare is already kicking up dirt and debris before the smaller funnel can join in the assault on the ground.

Everything in Eames is telling him to run and take cover, that he is a speck of dust in a breeze, with no power and with no control at all. He wants to yank Arthur away to safety, but Arthur doesn’t even have a cellar. Arthur doesn’t even seem to mind how close the tornadoes creep towards them. Not a thrown tree or the telltale debris of a house or barn torn to shreds will move this man.

The wind roars at them for defying it. It deafens and cows Eames even more. All the air around them feels unbreathable, and all Eames can feel past the dust and dirt tickling his face is his tears. He’s so tense his muscles ache. Any minute now, he’s sure his heart will give up under yet another house blown and scattered like dandelion seeds off in the distance.

Beside him, as unmoved as a titan, Arthur fiddles the spent match between his fingers before tossing it out into the air. It’s snatched by the wind at once, vanishing.

Now Eames understands. He’s bigger than Arthur, stronger, but Arthur’s never been the one to flinch from a gun in his face, he doesn’t spook in the midst of danger, he courts it. Hell, everyone must, to live in a place like this, to have all the human instincts to cower only for Arthur to return, over and over, and rebuild again and again.

There is only one tornado still spinning towards them as the wind shifts. Eames stands flush against Arthur’s back and grips the railing on either side of him.

“You’re okay, Eames,” is all Arthur says, his hands light, resting on Eames’ wrists. “It’s too far away for panic.”

“What happens when that changes?”

“It won’t.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

He turns a little towards Eames, but his eyes are still on the tornado. The couple with the guitars are out on their porch as well now, watching with neither Eames’ fear or Arthur’s calm. They’re filming the storm, wrapped around each other and smiling the way Mal does on roller coasters. It’s wild and uncontrollable, a thrill in the midst of so much chaos as the man holds their crying son, making him wave to the camera even as the boy's face turns red with his sobbing. All Eames can see is Arthur at that age, reaching out to his mother for some hope of safety his father is denying him, only for his mother to ease his little fist from her shirt, denying him too. He wants to march across the grass and the house between them and snatch the boy away and take him indoors, free him from the noise if nothing else.

The monster spins and twists indeed like a snake. It’s a thunderous cobra of a funnel, dancing beyond the line of trees with some flying around it as if in a spell. A tree down the road loses one of its long branches. It crashes to the street where it’s dragged through the hail and rain. Eames can only stand in awe and watch another explosion of debris bloom around the tornado as it strikes yet another building somewhere.

Arthur shifts on his bare feet and takes Eames’ hands, tucks them under his shirt so Eames can hold him. “It’s over. Just wait a few more seconds. You'll see.”

He’s right. The tornado hits the forest, slowing down as if tangled in too many treetops and sturdy trunks. All its debris are held suspended for a moment before they begin to plummet back to the ground. Eames can’t tell when the hail passes, too caught up in watching this massive cobra trip over itself and weaken into nothing.

“My god,” he breathes, as the last wisp of dirt diminish, taking the hard winds away with it.

He’s panting now, his heart pounding against Arthur’s back. He holds Arthur tightly, one arm anchoring Arthur by the waist as his free hand mindlessly rakes over Arthur’s wet hair. He presses his face to the back of Arthur’s head, burying his face in his neck for a moment before he can look out at the fields again.

Arthur turns his head a little to glance back at him. “You okay?” His profile, the long line of his neck, his slight shoulders, and the back pressed to his chest is a sight even more beautiful and strong, powerful to Eames than its ever been.

Eames’ palm splays over a flat stomach that could be made from stone for how resilient Arthur is. He thinks of a titan again.

His words tremble when he finds his voice. “You’re a bull in sheep’s clothes, you know that?” Arthur’s little huffed laugh makes his chest ache when he hears it.

Arthur moves away to inspect the yard and the house. He frowns. “Well, all of mom’s flowers are gone again. I’ll have to replant them.” He nods his head at the couple, who are now both rocking the wailing child in a vain attempt to quiet him.  

More people emerge as a police car drives through with its siren lights on. Its stopped by the branches in the road. The kids he’d seen before race out of an old screen door to hurry and collect as many balls of hail in their shirts as they can before their mother is heard calling them back inside.

Life goes on, just like that.

Eames knows that nothing on earth will convince him to come back here ever again. And he wants to weep when it hits him that Arthur _will_ come back, over and over again to preserve this place, until the day that a storm worse than this refuses to stop at the forest and takes him and this house.

Arthur’s voice soothes him then, his fingers lacing with Eames’ as he eases into his space like a blanket. He presses his lips to Eames’ wet cheek, whispering, “It’s over,” between his kisses. “Told you you’d be fine.” He brushes away a blade of grass out of Eames’ hair, sympathetic and tender, but Eames is still unnerved. He squeezes Eames’ hands. “Let’s go inside and get cleaned up.”

++

+

 

**End.**

**Author's Note:**

> For questions, inspiration tags, and more for this fic and others, visit grizzly-bear-bane.tumblr.com
> 
> [tag: oklahoma summer au]


End file.
